


and though I am not trained, I think I know enough

by ladyzanra



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alcohol, Chocolate, Coda, Episode Tag, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Men of Letters Bunker, Season/Series 09, Valentine's Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-14
Updated: 2014-02-14
Packaged: 2018-01-11 19:03:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1176731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyzanra/pseuds/ladyzanra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cas presses his reply to the hinge of your jaw, just below your left ear.</p><p>Warmth spreads through you, gentle and tingling at once. His lips flow over your jaw, your cheek, like familiar words in a strange language. You lift your head slowly, and when his mouth slides into place over yours you understand the words. They are what they’ve always been: <i>hello, Dean.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	and though I am not trained, I think I know enough

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [The Offer](http://www.last.fm/music/Katie+Herzig/Weightless). Written mostly to [this song](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-j86tzxi8s) and [this song](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Sh5DWAjMik). I've never written in second person before and I have no idea where this came from.

You don’t get up and go out to greet him when you hear his voice, that strange mix of certitude and hesitance, of kindness and steel, of granite and ether. His are low sounds, words too far away to catch, but somehow they spread out beneath you like solid ground, familiar territory, no matter how hard you try to push them away. You push them away anyway. You only come out when Sam calls you and you realize your bottle of whiskey is somehow empty and you don’t think you could get away with pretending to have fallen asleep. (That would only make things worse for later, anyway.)  
  
He’s standing at the foot of the wrought iron stairs – pretty much the only touch of elegance in the clunky utilitarian map room. You think for a bizarre moment that the railing spans out and up from behind his shoulder like some sort of metal-crafted wing. You close your eyes and pinch the bridge of your nose.  
  
When you open your eyes again, you see that he’s holding a brown bag, one of those fancy ones with a plastic handle.  
  
“Cas,” you hate the grogginess in your voice, the rawness. You pretend you don’t see the concern in his limpid blue eyes. “You’re back.”  
  
“Hello, Dean.” Always _hello, Dean_.  
  
“How’d it go? Any news? You figure out where Gadreel or Metatron are?” You catch yourself running your eyes up and down him, looking for any sign of injury, of blood. He’s fine. You stop.  
  
“No. I found and asked many of my brothers and sisters, but none of them were able to help me.” He averts his gaze. “Mostly the opposite.”  
  
“But you’re okay, right?” you ask.  
  
“I’m fine,” he dismisses. “They were weaker than me. I was simply unwilling to torture them. I didn’t kill them,” he adds, as if you would be angry or even surprised if he did. You knit your eyebrows. He explains, “I couldn’t. Can’t take that path anymore. I won’t hurt any more of my brothers or sisters.”  
  
You don’t nod. You press your lower lip up into your upper, a little, and stare. You distrust this change.  He worries you. _Talk first, stab later_ , you’d told him. You hadn’t told him not to stab.  
  
He tilts his head imperceptibly at you, squinting a little. He changes the topic. “I’m here for a different reason. Dean.” He looks at you with that intense seriousness that tends to catch you off guard because you never know what’s gonna come after it. “Sam. Do you know what day it is?”  
  
“It’s uh. It’s.” You realize that, shockingly, you don’t. You don’t know whether it’s Monday or Friday, you’re not even sure whether you’ve crossed the border into February or if it’s still January.  
  
Wow.  
  
“Friday?” Sam says through a mouth-shrug.  
  
Cas sighs. He looks at you both rather sadly. “Not even you, Sam?”  
  
You feel slightly offended. You eye the bag Cas is holding, suspecting it to be some sort of clue. Lean forward a little and peer inside.  
  
“ _Oh_ ,” you groan, and roll your eyes. You can’t help it. It comes out the moment you realize. “Good grief.”  
  
Cas is perfectly undaunted by your lack of enthusiasm. Maybe he had expected it. Actually, he is happier and more beaming with purpose than you’ve seen him in a long time. He puts the bag down by his feet, crouches down and reaches inside. You let yourself be distracted from what’s happening by the soft whiteness of his forehead just beneath the dark creeping moss of hair. But only for a moment. He pulls out two large red hearts. He stands up and extends one to each of you.  
  
“Happy Valentine’s day,” he says, the way no one has probably said it before, with a little nod like he’s proud of himself, but also with genuine intent behind the words, with meaning.  
  
You find yourself taking what he offers you, despite everything, fingers curling around the box’s edges.  
  
\--  
  
You want to tell him that grown men don’t go out and buy boxes of chocolate for their grown-men friends on Valentine’s day. Except he’s done it. And he’s an angel, not a man, so the wording would be even more awkward.  
  
And the chocolate is fucking delicious.  
  
You don’t recognize the name of the company. You think it probably came from a specialty shop, not a supermarket or card store. Either Cas doesn’t know supermarkets sell Valentine’s day merchandise, or he’s one of those people who tends towards sophisticated gifts. One of those angels. No, that’s not right either. Angels don’t buy gifts. (What the fuck even _is_ he, anyway?)  
  
You hadn’t really meant to start eating them. You hadn’t meant to eat _most_ of them. You’d thought your stomach was too unsettled from the alcohol to put anything else in it. But then he’d just stood there, staring at you expectantly, waiting. You’d looked over to catch Sam’s eye, to make sure Sam understood; but Sammy was way ahead of you, had the lid off and was already chewing. You’d  felt distinctly ungrateful and you’d opened your own lid and grabbed one at random. Little had you known.  
  
“Wow, Cas, this is delicious,” Sam had said, marveling.  
  
“Fucking _phenomenal_ ,” you’d managed, chewing. Your mouth had been full of sweet gooey raspberry and smooth dark chocolate, your tastebuds fucking massaged by it. You couldn’t taste any whiskey. Like it’d been magically washed away.  
  
“Thanks, man,” said Sam. “Sorry we don’t, uh, have anything for you.”  
  
“Is it… good? Does it compare to other chocolate you’ve had? You’re not just saying that?”  
  
“It’s _really_ good,” you’d assured, without thinking. You were going back for another piece, being more discriminating this time, looking around for one that might compare to the one you’d just consumed. You had no idea what had come over you. You should have been playing it cooler, it should have been weirder than it was. You’d only stared down at a heartful of delicately shaped chocolates a _handful_ of times in your entire life. You’d picked out a raindrop-shaped one that had tasted like hazelnut and it had been almost as good as the first.  
  
“I’m glad,” Cas had smiled, quietly content.  
  
You look over at the box now, sitting to the left of your laptop, lid MIA. Only three pieces remain. You can’t remember all the flavors of the ones you’ve eaten; the alcohol is still in your system, a couple hours later. They had all been amazing. But a few stood out. A little square truffle with pecans and caramel, a white star filled with coconut, a round mousse, a cherry filled dark chocolate. And of course, raspberry, your favorite. Naturally you’re out of that one. You wonder suddenly, with childish excitement, if Sam has any left, if he would be willing to trade you. The way you used to when you were kids and dad sometimes let you both go trick-or-treating. You actually start to get out of your chair; you stop, sit your ass back down.  
  
You push the box away.  
  
You feel kind of queasy after all, like the whiskey’s sloshing over the sweets in your stomach. You take your laptop and remove yourself to your bedroom. You leave the chocolate, Cas’s gift, out on the table, abandoned. Just another thing to hate yourself for. Add it to the list and it’s like a drop in the ocean; you lose sight of it. All you see is one large destructive existence which drains the light from the people you love, like a blackhole. You are a blackhole and you eat the stars. Nebulae have been wasted on you. You’re drunk on nausea, is what you are, holy fuck. But you believe yourself anyway.  
  
You sit on the bed. You drop your head into your hands and you’re angry that Cas doesn’t know the rules. That he does things like this.  
  
You add your anger to the list, too.  
  
\--  
  
Cas finds you.  
  
At some point, you have to go out to the kitchen to get a glass of water. As you head back to your room, you hear him following you. You wonder if he’s seen the neglected chocolates in the little hallway room you’d been using.  You consider, for a moment, being a terrible person, consider pretending not to hear him and slipping into your room before he can stop you. The door is only like, seven feet away.  
  
You turn around instead, because he _really_ doesn’t deserve more douchiness from you. "Heya, Cas. You finish all your research?” He’s been in the library researching for hours. You take a sip of your water.  
  
“Yes.”  
  
There’s no way to measure that ‘yes’; no way to see around it, either. “You takin’ off?” Then you wonder if that’s really what you should have said. Your throat is dry despite the water.  
  
“Tomorrow,” he says.  
  
You glance at your watch. It's ten thirty. You nod non-comittally, neutrally. “Tomorrow,” you murmur. You don’t know what else to say. It seems too far away and too soon at the same time. You’re suddenly annoyed at the research, as if it should have been harder, taken him longer. “Wow. You really don’t wear out your welcome, do you?”  
  
“Dean, every day that Metatron is out there, free to wreak—”  
  
“Yeah, no,” you cut him off abruptly. “I get it.”  
  
 _(Do_ you get it? You’re not sure. You’re not sure you understand a single fucking thing about yourself right now; except that you’re a goddamn mess.)    
  
“We all gotta play our part,” you rub your forehead.  
  
 _Play our part._  You think of Crowley bringing you the First Blade, of the time ahead when you’ll have to go after Abaddon. It scares you, this mission you’ve signed yourself up for. This brand you’ve allowed to be put on yourself. Your blood turns cold beneath your skin. You finish the rest of your water.  
  
Crowley doesn’t even know where the bunker is, so it’s not like he’s just gonna show up on your doorstep. Besides, you _want_ to kill Abbadon. Want to rip her apart for what she did to the Men of Letters and for what she’s doing now to god knows how many people. But also for her merciless laugh and for the way her fingernails had dug into your hair. Into your head. Sometimes killing Abaddon is the only thing you have, as fucked up as that sounds; the only thing you could possibly do right.  
  
“For what it’s worth,” Cas says, regretful, shadows in the curves of his cheeks, “I’d much rather not. I’d rather be here.”  
  
And even though you still can’t see around that last sentence, your heart skips a beat. “Listen, Cas,” you focus on the important stuff, locking eyes with him. “If some psycho fallen angel comes at you, you don’t think twice, all right? You gank that fucker. You don’t try to make friends with a rabid dog.”  
  
“I can heal rabid dogs,” Cas points out. Okay, so it was a bad analogy. That doesn’t change anything. You close your eyes briefly and grind your teeth. “Okay,” he says, to your surprise. “I won’t—” he pauses, choosing his words, “run toward danger any more than I have to.”  
  
“Promise?”  
  
“Yes, I promise.”  
  
You stare at him doubtfully. You’re not sure you trust him. But what the hell can you do about it? “Just don’t get yourself killed,”  you say eventually.  
  
“I won’t.”  
  
Says the dude who’s already gotten himself killed what, four times already? _Yeah_. This conversation is fucking pointless, you think, good job. You can’t help him. You’re fucking tired of a life you’re too useless for. Of being worse than useless.  
  
There’s nothing left to say. You plan on going back to your room. Just turning around and walking away, because you and Cas have never actually _said_ “goodbye” to each other, not even a small one. The only way you’ve ever said goodbye to him is to (try to) make yourself to forget about him, to push him out of your mind.  
  
But he doesn’t go anywhere.

“What?” you frown.  
  
“I haven’t given you the rest of your Valentine.”  
  
Your heart skips several beats this time. Then it races. “Is, uh, this something you gave to Sam, too?”  
  
Cas raises his eyebrows a little and the corner of his lip curls up. “Sam is a wonderful person and good friend. But he is not, as you would say, ‘my type’.”  
  
Oh shit. You blink about a hundred times and just stand there, gaping like a fish. “You have,” you don’t have enough breath in your lungs for talking, “you have a type.”   
  
“No,” Cas confesses calmly. “Just you.”  
  
You can’t. Just. No. Out of the fucking question.  
  
There’s no space between you two anymore. Maybe there never was, maybe you’ve been talking this close the entire time. “Cas,” you try. Try to explain. But it doesn’t come out the way you’d meant it to. You don’t even know how you’d meant it to come out.  
  
You lower your eyes, bow your head, stare at the floor which is your last hope because hey, it might open up and swallow you at that exact moment. You’ve seen weirder.  
  
Cas presses his reply to the hinge of your jaw, just below your left ear.  
   
Warmth spreads through you, gentle and tingling at once. His lips flow over your jaw, your cheek, like familiar words in a strange language. You lift your head slowly, and when his mouth slides into place over yours you understand the words. They are what they’ve always been: _hello, Dean_.  
  
His right hand closes over your shoulder and there is more warmth there, more words, a trigger of memories. You wrap your hands around the nape of his neck.  
  
You have wanted this for so long.  
  
“I thought I just told you to stay away from danger,” you say, your anger resurfacing.  
  
“I’m an angel, you ass.” And he’s so perfectly, ironically cocky about it.  
  
“Not all the time.”  
  
“More often than you, though.”  
  
“I’m ‘just a man’, is that it?”  
  
He winces at the memory the line stirs and draws back. “No,” he says, with eyes suddenly so fucking blue and sad. Something wrings itself tight in your chest. “I know what it’s like now.” You know this; you know he does. “I know what _you’re_ like.”  
  
You take a jerky step back, let go of him.  
  
He looks afraid. “Dean.” But he doesn’t move, doesn’t chase after you. His hands still half linger in the air where you were.  
  
A series of sounds from around the corner of the hallway makes you both turn your heads.  
  
Sam. You’d forgotten that he, too, resides in the bunker. The impulse strikes you to shut this whole thing down, to use Sam as an escape. Then you realize how _cold_ you are without Cas’s touch, how starved you are for it, how much you want his mouth whispering into your skin right now. So you do the selfish thing.  
  
You take Cas by the wrist and lead him into your room and shut the door quietly behind you both. You listen for a moment, for two moments. You hear Sam walk by. You’re surprised that he doesn’t slow down, that he doesn’t open your door to investigate. As if, even though he didn’t see or hear you, he should somehow know what you’re up to anyway, a brotherly intuition or something.  
  
You’re so fucking stupid.  
  
But Cas is a warm presence curving over your shoulder, listening with you, and you’re relieved that you’ve managed to keep him a secret. When you turn around you lean into him and he takes _you_ by the wrist and leads you to your bed. You sit. He kneels down in front of you as if you’re an altar, then unties and slides your boots off as if you’re an overtired child. You watch him. You want to run your fingers through his dark hair, you want to kiss his pale serious forehead, to map the strange peaks and crevices of his face, which have always fascinated you. You restrain yourself.  
  
“Cas.”  
  
He tugs your socks off, which, kind of embarrassing, the amount of attention he pays it. You happen to know your feet are fucking gross. You wonder when he’s gonna realize that himself. “Dean Winchester, you are so much more than you seem to think you are. You are so much more than you allow yourself to be.” You’re about to argue that, when he starts rubbing gentle circles behind the bone of your ankle, over the bone, down the sides of your feet. It's weird. It works. (Which is basically Cas in a nutshell.) “If you keep running away from yourself, how will I ever find you?”  
  
“Why do you want to? Damn it, there are billions of people on this planet, Cas, and you only know, what, a handful? How do you know I’m—“  
  
“The one I love?” Cas puts his hands on your knees and looks up at you. You’re taken aback by how little he’s affected by your objection. You’re distracted by the pressure he’s putting on your thighs. “Does the thought ever cross your mind that someone else might have made a better brother for you than Sam?” he asks.  
  
“That’s different. There’s no choice there, man, Sam’s just my brother. That’s just the way it is.”  
  
“No,” Cas insists, “it’s the same.” Sometimes, he's as stubborn as he always was. He stands up and begins to slide your plaid shirt off your shoulders. “No one else could be your brother because _no one else is Sam_. It has nothing to do with selection or comparison, Dean. You don’t love Sam because he’s your brother. You love him for _who he is_. Similarily, I don’t love you because you’re the one I love. I simply love you.”  
  
You try to make sense of this as he shrugs your sleeve off one arm, then the other. He folds your plaid shirt like it’s a sacred object and then puts it on the floor. You’re hypnotized by the careful precision of his fingers. “Yeah, um, was that supposed to be funnier in Enochian?” you murmur. “'Cause I don’t get it.”  
  
He doesn't answer. You realize it’s because he’s just spotted the mark on your arm. Somehow, you’d forgotten about it. For a horrible moment, everything is uncertain. Then he sighs, but not for the reason you expect. “You Winchesters always need everything spelled out for you.” He pulls your black tee over your head, like he’s some sort of tee pulling-off expert. His fingers brush against your stomach, your arms, and your breath hitches. “Very well.” He kneels back down, traces circles on the tops of your feet, anointing them. “I love you because there are miles in your footprints.” He takes your hands in his. “Because there are constellations between your fingers.” He runs his fingers up over every notch in your spine, sending shivers across your back. “Because there are mountains beneath your spine.” His fingers crest your shoulders and then slide back down, trace the contour of your ribs. He kisses your ribs, your stomach. “Because there are oceans within your chest.”  
  
“Nah, that’s just all the chocolate you bought me.”  
  
“ _Dean_.” But you think maybe you can feel his mouth smiling against your skin. You can’t help smiling a little too, idiotically. You break, finally bury your fingers in his hair. It ignites something in you, something you partly fight, even as you scatter your so-called constellations in his hair.  
  
He kisses the bones that close over your heart and tells you they close over a solar storm. You’re not sure what a solar storm even fucking is. His lips continue their journey to the gap between your collarbones, to the soft spot of your throat, to the tip of your chin, to your mouth. Then he’s slipped into Enochian and you’re not sure he’s realized it and that’s how you find out it _isn’t_ funnier in Enochian, you’re breathing in prayer books and oil and fire on a startling gust of grace, you’re breathing in the cosmos and _the cosmos knows who you are_. It’s the very opposite of funny.  
  
“There’s a whole world out there, Cas.” You have his face in your hands and he’s looking up at you with eyes you’ve never seen before, eyes that are strangely distraught; ardent, _shattered_ eyes, you don’t know how else to describe it. “You really sure you wanna miss out on it because of me?” There’s still something bitter in your voice, after everything.  
  
He stares at you in amazement. Like, _Are you really that hopeless? Must I really explain it_ again _?_ “You _are_ the world, Dean.”  
  
“I’m a mess,” you say. “I’m a sinking world.” He wraps his hand around the mark on your arm and stands you up. He leans forward and undoes the buckle of your belt.  
  
“That’s not the way I see it.” He slides the belt neatly, slowly out of the loops, which you’re not sure anyone else has ever done for you before. His hands graze your hips and you are _extremely_ aware of it. You're hard beneath your jeans. He looks up at you and then smiles wryly. “It’s not all about you, Dean.”  
  
You interrupt the ritual he’s made of you to take his own trench coat off. You are much messier than him, much hastier; you let it fall to the floor, where it lands, probably, in a clump. Followed by the rest of his clothes.

\--

In the morning when you wake in the darkness of your room, all you feel is him, tangled around you, limbs like rivers weaving over the earth. He did not sleep. Or maybe he did. (You have a lot of questions about his angelhood right now. None of which are truly relevant.) Either way, he knows it the moment you’re conscious.  
  
“Good morning,” he says in your ear.  
  
 Your heart rate quickens, your muscles tighten. For a brief moment, you feel suffocated, caught, _naked_ – which, okay. Understandable.  
  
You remember. You relax.  
  
You sink into his deceptively small frame, give your weight to him. “Mornin’, Cas.” A single nervous butterfly flutters out with the words. You’re slightly hung over. You resign yourself to the fact that he’s well aware of it, and let your fingers idly caress the back of his shoulder anyway. “And, uh,” you smile a little, suddenly kinda dorky. “Happy Valentine’s day to you too.”  
  
“This isn't really for Valentine’s day,” he admits.  
  
You knew that.  
  
His voice is like sunlight slanting through the window your bunker room doesn’t have. It’s like bedrock, too, like an island you drag yourself onto and rest against, drenched and tired, after a long struggle with the sea. It is above you and below you at once, inside and out. You close your eyes and fold your forehead into his chest, tuck yourself beneath his chin. You never knew it would feel this good, coming home.


End file.
